Case Study - Wellcome Open Research - State-of-the-Art Journal Writing and Publishing Platform

Wellcome has launched an open research publishing platform which will enable their grantees to rapidly publish all outputs from their research. They use state-of-the-art services developed by and integrated with F1000Research which support faster research outputs, reproducibility and transparency - this includes integration with Overleaf for authoring services and editorial workflow. The platform will allow Wellcome grantees to publish a wide variety of outputs from standard research articles and data sets, through to null and negative results.

The fast publication and transparent post-publication peer review were some deciding factors for Wellcome to mirror the F1000Research author services and integrations. The F1000Research full publishing ecosystem works beautifully - for both F1000 authors and staff. The platform provides immediate publication (average time being seven to ten days) followed by transparent invited peer review, with inclusion of supporting data, enabling researchers to reanalyse, replicate and reuse the data, all of which help to improve the reproducibility and reliability of the research. Once articles pass peer review, they get indexed in major bibliographic databases and deposited in PubMed Central and Europe PMC. F1000Research, and now Wellcome Open Research, disseminate results almost immediately, ensuring critical advances in urgent areas of research are not held up by lengthy journal processes.

Overleaf provides authoring templates and services as well as an integrated LaTeX editorial workflow for F1000Research, and is now providing the same set-up for Wellcome Open Research. Overleaf’s authoring platform, templates and integrated workflows round out the full publishing ecosystem being provided by F1000Research and Wellcome Open Research - allowing them to provide services and support to their authors from the beginning of the writing process.

The Overleaf integrations include customized F1000 and Wellcome LaTeX authoring templates on the Overleaf platform. These templates can be accessed via links on the F1000Research and Wellcome Open Research platform websites, found within the Overleaf template gallery, or found from a Google search. The authoring templates allow authors to quickly and easily open a template, view the author instructions and guidelines directly within the template, and write in the correct journal style and format. The Overleaf platform composes the document automatically as the author writes - the author writes on the left of the screen and can see the ‘finished’ file (based on the template layout) on the right. Authors can easily collaborate with their colleagues through the simple share options within Overleaf; and with the option of writing in Rich Text or LaTeX source code, depending upon the author’s preference, cross disciplinary collaboration is much easier.

Once the author is finished collaborating and writing, they simply click a link to ‘Submit to F1000Research’ or ‘Submit to Wellcome Open Research’. This simplified submission link transfers all necessary files and metadata directly into the F1000Research/Wellcome submission system - no new data entry is required. Overleaf is then integrated into the editorial workflow - editors receive an alert that a document has been submitted, they easily open the document via a weblink and make tracked changes and comments, as necessary. Overleaf automatically saves all changes as a ‘reviewed’ version and the editor clicks the ‘return to author’ button once they are finished. The author is invited back into the document to review changes and reply to comments. Once all changes are updated and agreed upon, the document is ready to be published and the transparent, invited peer review process begins.

This simplified, author-focused integration and workflow has been highly successful for F1000Research. Prior to offering the Overleaf LaTeX template, submission process and editorial workflow, F1000Research did not accept any submissions in LaTeX. Since its launch in 2013, the Overleaf integration has been hugely popular with authors, and is the source of 10-15% of all submissions that come into F1000Research (read more in this recent case study). And since Overleaf provides all technical support for authors and editors, F1000 did not need to make any internal changes to support LaTeX questions or issues.

Through this partnership, F1000Research and Overleaf combine to provide a state-of-the-art authoring platform, submission system and publishing workflow, and we’re delighted that Wellcome Open Research is now mirroring that successful system.